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The place to talk about games and other things that matterIt’s Tuesday. Today’s screenshot comes from an isometric RPG named Seven. The game is being developed using the Unreal Engine 4 by indie studio Fool’s Theory, which is made up of ex-staff from CD Projekt RED. Continue reading...

Google’s new OS emphasizes security after last OS, Lollipop, contained a bug that allowed users to take control of a device by sending a textGoogle’s new operating system is called Marshmallow. The new name was revealed on Monday not in a press release but in a statue outside Google’s office in Mountain View, California. This will be the 13th official, renamed iteration for the Linux-based operating system, on which the company’s mobile phones and tablets are run.Eleven of the other names for the mobile system software kept with the dessert theme (the first two were just Alpha and Beta): Continue reading...

Your article about paternoster lifts (Why Germans fought so hard to save their paternoster lifts, 14 August) brought back happy memories of sixth-form voluntary service at school in central London in the late 1960s. To get out of any sport-related activity, my friend Sheila and I wheeled a tea trolley round all the outpatient departments of St Thomas’ hospital on Wednesday afternoons, doing our bit to help those waiting to be seen. Our self-selected reward at the end of the day was a ride on the staff-only paternoster lift, something we’d never come across before or, as far as I’m concerned, since. Like Dejan Tuco, we thought it particularly daring to do the full circuit, going round the hidden top and bottom of the lift, where you could hear the mechanism grinding away. Such innocent pleasures!

Former White House press secretary Jay Carney defends the competitive work environment of his new employer Amazon after a damning New York Times exposé into the retail giant. Speaking to CBS This Morning on Monday, Carney says he does not recognise the company portrayed in the article, which described working conditions devoid of empathy and a brutal push for greater productivity and efficiency. He says employees are drawn to the company because they agree with its ‘spirit of innovation’• Watch Jay Carney’s full interview on CBS This Morning Continue reading...

App offers practical assistance to refugees arriving in the eastern German city and comes in response to recent anti-immigrant hostilityA smartphone app has been launched to help asylum seekers find their feet in Dresden, which became the epicentre of anti-immigrant hostility in Germany earlier this year.The Welcome to Dresden app, developed by two IT companies based in the eastern German city, gives refugees information on how to register with the authorities, get health insurance and find their way around.

Read receipts – those signifiers that a message has been opened and read – fill me with terror, but plenty of people keep them on. Why?There was a time when the main thing you had to worry about in casual social situations was the decision between a peck-on-the-cheek, a handshake, or a hug upon greeting.Meanwhile, relationships have always been fraught with double meanings and crossed wires. Flowers – a spontaneous, fresh-scented display of thoughtfulness? Or a floral attempt to make amends, reeking of guilt? Continue reading...

Chief executive said in an internal email that the New York Times article did not describe the Amazon he knewAmazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos has defended his company after allegations of employee cruelty made by the New York Times.In a rare communication from the 51-year-old, Bezos told staff to carefully read the “very long” article and compared it with a “very different take by a current Amazonian” in an internal all-staff email.

Even though I will miss the convenience of buying stuff on my laptop in my underpants, claims about its brutal office culture are the final straw

The meal-replacement startup argues that the metals are only present in safe levelsFood replacement startup Soylent has hit back at claims that its product contains unhealthy levels of lead and cadmium, after environmental campaign group As You Sow announced its intention to sue the firm under California’s Proposition 65.The law, also known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, imposes strict limits on the levels of toxic elements that can be found in foodstuffs without a warning label. But Soylent argues that its only error is one of labelling, and that the levels of the metals in its product are totally safe. Continue reading...

The bitcoin wars have begun, as Bitcoin XT squares off against the classic flavour of the cryptocurrencyCryptocurrency bitcoin is facing civil war, with two high-profile developers announcing plans to split the code that underpins the network.Known as a “fork”, the new version of bitcoin (dubbed Bitcoin XT) would support more transactions per hour, at the cost of increasing the amount of memory required to hold a full database of all the bitcoin transactions throughout history, known as the blockchain. Continue reading...

FAA says ‘technical issues’ with an air traffic control computer undergoing a software update caused 492 flight delays and 476 cancellations over weekend

Insurer also criticises taxi industry for ignoring its customers, warning ‘the sharing economy is here to stay’A major insurer has accused the taxi industry of a “campaign of self-interest” after it became the target of a complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over its coverage of UberX drivers.NRMA, one of the few companies that has publicly stated its willingness to insure UberX drivers, also criticised the taxi industry for ignoring its customers and warned “the sharing economy is here to stay”. Continue reading...

Microsoft Translator, InboxVudu, MSTY, Morpholio Journal, Monsters Ate My Metropolis, Loot & Legends, March of Empires and moreWelcome to this week’s roundup of the latest, greatest new iPhone and iPad apps and games. All prices are correct at the time of writing, with “IAP” indicating use of in-app purchases.You can read the previous Best iPhone and iPad Apps roundups for more recommendations, but if Android is your platform of choice, check the Best Android Apps roundups. On with this week’s selection. Continue reading...

Multibillionaire says new Jeremy Clarkson show will be ‘very, very, very expensive’ and says UK could be early-adopter of drone-delivered parcelsThe Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has admitted it will be “very, very, very expensive” to launch a new motoring show with Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear co-stars after signing up the controversial trio in a multimillion-pound deal following their departure from the BBC.The billionaire tech entrepreneur said viewers were enjoying a golden era of television and that the new Clarkson series would be a global success. Continue reading...

The app became embroiled in a Twitter storm last week after a reporter accused it of being a forum for casual sex. So is Tinder really destroying romance? We asked two young people who have used it for their viewsAccording to Nancy Jo Sales’s précis of Tinder in Vanity Fair this month, the online app prompts easy access to instant hook-ups and has created a generation of sex-obsessed commitment-phobes. “You’re always prowling, you can swipe a couple hundred people a day,” says a “handsome twentysomething man” she interviewed. The controversial article even made it onto Newsnight last week, when presenter Evan Davis asked a psychologist whether women were “disadvantaged” because of the hit-it-and-quit-it culture Tinder has allegedly invented. Is Sales’s account brutal, or brutally honest? According to my male mates, yes, most men go on Tinder just to hook up. As Andrew shrugged: “Finding a girlfriend on Tinder is like trying to find one in Ibiza.” But, if we’re being brutally honest, it’s not just men exploiting the app for their sexual gain. I think the idea that women are at any disadvantage is entirely patronising. Though most of my single, female friends use Tinder in the hope of meeting “a nice guy who won’t just send me pictures of lubricant,” I know several who are on it purely for casual dates, and some simply for casual sex. Every bloke I know on Tinder has had at least one proposition from a girl he’s “matched” with on the app before they’ve even swapped phone numbers. Continue reading...

Google’s radical restructuring seems inspired by the veteran investor’s Berkshire Hathaway empire. Suddenly, the most unfashionable of corporate models is backConglomerates have been distinctly unfashionable among investors for decades. But that may be about to change.Just as Warren Buffett put the final touches to a $37.2bn deal to add a nuts-and-bolts maker to his sprawling Berkshire Hathaway empire last week, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin unveiled a restructuring that borrowed liberally from the sage of Omaha’s rulebook. Continue reading...

The creation this week of Alphabet has put the 43-year-old in the driver’s seat of a slimmed-down Google, giving him the authority to put his ambition to the testLast weekend, one of the most glittering alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur did not show up to give a school prize as he had promised. Sundar Pichai, then head of product at Google, begged off for reasons that became abundantly clear over the next few days: he had just been promoted to chief executive, and he had work to do.The tech industry has seen its share of strange corporate maneuvers, but Google’s realignment this week has to be among the strangest. The company pulled off a sort of upside-down merger with itself, in effect creating a holding company called Alphabet that runs a mega-profitable company called Google on the one hand and a dozen other money-losers and long-odds bets that Google has called “moonshots” on the other. Continue reading...

Susan is wary of switching to the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system following recent negative publicity. Is it worth upgrading?What is your opinion on the privacy issue concerning Microsoft Windows 10? Currently I use InPrivate Browsing on Windows 7 Professional to protect myself from intrusive tracking. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Correspondence obtained by the Guardian shows Project Titan is further along than many suspected and company is scouting for test locationsApple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.

Laurence Bain led Premier Farnell, which makes the educational mini-computer, for three years but saw stock plunge to a six-year low in JulyPremier Farnell, which makes the Raspberry Pi mini-computer, has ousted its chief executive, Laurence Bain, following disappointing recent results.Bain ran the company for the last three years after taking over from Harriet Green, who left to take charge of Thomas Cook. Mark Whiteling, Premier’s chief financial officer, has been appointed as interim chief executive until a permanent successor is found. Continue reading...

IoT is helping make privacy and autonomy the preserve of the powerful. As technology’s glare increases, it’s imperative we question who benefits from itRecently I went on a BBC news programme to give “the privacy side” of a technology story. Employees of a software company in Sweden had implanted chips in their wrists that activated the company photocopier. Yes, you read that right. Having minor surgery instead of just remembering a four-digit PIN is a pretty daft idea. You’d have to be a tech utopian to want to do it.But this news story wasn’t just about privacy and new technologies, and how “we’ll all soon be doing it”. This story was about power: who has it, who doesn’t, how it is used. And the internet of things, too, is about power. Continue reading...

Join us to watch the TEDxMelbourne 2015 live from 11am. TEDxMelbourne’s theme this year is ‘the stuff of dreams’, from uncovering vast visions for humanity, or just the local community, to stories of adventure, exploration and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds with strength and courage.• Full list of speakers Continue reading...

The tech company’s 2014 EEO report, which it finally released after repeated refusal, showed only 11 people of color were in upper management positionsMore than 70% of Apple’s most senior executives are white men, the company’s first official diversity filings show.

Harvard student Aran Khanna lost position after he launched app called Marauder’s Map that could pinpoint location of Facebook Messenger usersA Harvard University student says he lost his internship at Facebook after he launched a browser application from his dorm room that exploited privacy flaws on the company’s mobile messenger.

A recent Vanity Fair piece heralded the ‘dawn of the dating apocalypse’, led by the app Tinder. Or has dating always been this way? Share your experiences of dating in the internet ageThe internet is ruining dating for everyone – or has it always been like this?A Vanity Fair piece published this week struck an ominous tone for 2015’s singletons. Headlined “Tinder and the dawn of the dating apocalypse”, it was brutal about the New York dating scene, placing the blame squarely at the feet of Tinder and other dating apps. Continue reading...

You’d think John Cridland, as head of the CBI, would know a bit about the games industry. Instead he comes out with a staggering haiku of ignoranceHi, I’m a bit confused. Is it still 2015 out there or have I somehow gone 30 years back in time? It’s just that, this morning, I saw the Independent’s interview with John Cridland, director general of the Confederation of British Industry. The role of this organisation, according to its incredibly dull website, is to promote and provide a voice for British businesses – so you’d think its director general would know a little bit about, say, one of the UK’s most vibrant and dynamic creative sectors. But this is what he had to say about video games, which he recognises as an important growth industry:Related: GameCity festival interviews: Lumino City – video Continue reading...

War with Apple hots up as Korean company launches larger version of smartphone matching Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus, and powerful new Note 5Samsung has launched two new phablets, the Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+, in its war with Apple and LG to maintain its large-screen smartphone crown.

Even as it draws you in with its central mystery, this game will frustrate you by being so damn slowRapture’s apocalypse is unlike those in other games. While you don’t initially know the cause, it’s clear it was no nuclear bomb or zombie horde. The tiny English village looks almost exactly as you’d expect one to have done 30 years ago, except that, as the title suggests, everybody’s gone.Games such as Rapture (often dubbed “walking simulators” by those who look down on them for having fewer traditionally game-like elements) commonly exclude human characters to ensure a more immersive experience, as in Gone Home, and developer The Chinese Room’s previous game Dear Esther. That raises the question here: what came first, the format or the story? Continue reading...

People aren’t the only ones threatened by drones invading their privacy, as spate of attacks caught on camera shows wildlife fighting backRemarkable footage of an eagle attacking and disabling a drone has taken the internet by storm, but it illustrates that drones can distress animals as much as they annoy humans.

As India’s cities struggle to turn the tables on rape and sexual assault, a new app allows women to share their stories of harassment and actively address abusive behaviour in their neighbourhoodsI was touched at rush hour at the busy Andheri Station. A person passing my rickshaw simply touched my breast and ran away while I sat disgusted and dumbfounded in the rickshaw at a signal. I couldn’t even see his face and don’t even know whom to hate more – him or my timing for being there at that point. (Andheri West)The Safecity app lets women share their stories of harassment and abuse in public spaces in cities. Elsa D’Silva, one of its founders, says that women can use it to report “what happened, where it happened and when it happened”. Continue reading...

Operating system contacts OneDrive, MSN and other services even if a user has activated privacy-protecting options, report discovers

New rules from eSports league ESL will match anti-doping policies of sporting bodies WADA and NADA, with saliva-based tests for playersProfessional gamers competing in events run by eSports body ESL are now banned from using marijuana during competitions, under the organisation’s new anti-doping policy.ESL announced plans in July to introduce the policy, promising that it would be “fair, feasible and conclusive while also respecting the privacy of players”. Now it has published details of its plans. Continue reading...

Live-streaming app’s founders say it now has nearly 2m daily active users watching 40 years of video per day to their smartphonesTwitter’s standalone app for live-streaming video, Periscope, now has nearly two million daily active users watching 40 years of broadcasts a day.Periscope published the stats to celebrate another milestone: its 10 millionth registered user since the app first launched for Apple’s iPhone in March, with an Android version following in May. Continue reading...

Welcome to Aleppo pushes back at the apathetic response to the impact of the civil war in Syria, but its maker wants action not just empathy“There’s a deafening apathy to all of the stories about refugees in a situation like Aleppo in Syria. To be honest, people don’t care any more, and we’ve had a few years of beating our heads against the wall trying to make people care.”As a freelance photographer and videographer, Christian Stephen has been trying to tell stories from war zones for the last half a decade while fretting about this challenge. His latest film, Welcome To Aleppo, uses technology to try to solve it. Continue reading...

We investigated Tinder’s defensive claims in reaction to the Vanity Fair article to find that many users might not be single and swiping in North Korea gets lonelyTinder fired off a series of intemperate tweets on Tuesday night in response to a Vanity Fair story that alleged the dawn of the “dating apocalypse” is upon us.Related: 'The Tinder Generation is real': app has online meltdown over Vanity Fair article Continue reading...

Police and government agencies asked for user information 299 times from January to the end of June, up from 116 in second half of 2014The number of requests for Twitter user data made by British authorities has more than doubled in the last six months, , figures reveal.

Feel free to bombard your friends with effectively unlimited direct messages now as the social network enables a longer unbroken serviceTwitter users can now send direct messages (DM) of up to 10,000 characters, three months after the company announced the forthcoming change to users and developers on its development blog.The new DMs, which are intended to be of effectively unlimited length for the typical user, are part of the company’s long-running effort to upgrade its messaging service to make it a more competitive alternative to market leaders such as Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger apps. Continue reading...

Documents show the tech company has skirted regulations for private firms for a year by flying its Project Wing aircraft over private land as part of a deal with NasaGoogle has been quietly testing its drone delivery program in US airspace and is planning further tests in rural California after striking a deal with Nasa, the Guardian has learned.Documents seen by the Guardian also reveal technical details of Google’s drone, which is capable of speeds of up to 100 mph and weighs less than 25kg (55lb). The papers also reveal Google’s safety plans should a drone lose contact with its operator.

Corporation will spend nearly half its advertising budget for paid-for media on promoting launch of online-only channelThe BBC has announced that half of the advertising budget it spends on paid-for media this year will be spent solely on promoting the launch of an online-only TV service to replace the BBC3 TV channel.The corporation said it intends to almost triple BBC3’s budget that is focused on paid-for media, ad space bought on commercial media and not through the use of BBC TV, radio and online inventory, in the year to the end of March 2016. Continue reading...

An employee sent 31 tweets responding to claim Tinder has brought about the ‘dating apocalypse’ – and denies that a significant chunk of users are marriedTinder has reacted poorly to being heralded as the harbinger of the “dating apocalypse” in Vanity Fair magazine, going on a defensive rampage on social media.Related: How to survive the dating apocalypse Continue reading...

From smart pans to connected scales, the internet of things is now tackling the art of cooking – so would professional chefs want to use these gadgets?

WIth a bigger – and vastly more engaged – Facebook fan base, the 73-year-old Vermont senator looks a lot like young Americans’ candidate of choiceHillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, or at least their campaign staff, spent Monday night posting altered versions of each other’s campaign slogans and logos, in a check-out-how-tech-savvy-I-am fight that might as well have been hashtagged #DownWithTheKids.

Google restructuring pushes companies’ search results right down the page – with alphabet.com, owned by BMW, reviewing ‘trademark infringement’One day after Google’s reorganisation under the umbrella brand Alphabet, you have to dig through three pages of internet search results just to find a single reference to an alphabet of any other kind – and when you do, you find Alphabet, a fleet-car services company owned by German auto giant BMW.

As Larry Page once told staff, technology is revolutionary, not evolutionary, and Google’s surprise move has experts speculating there are more changes to come

Suspects in the US and Ukraine accused of reading corporate press releases before they came out, and then trading on that information ahead of the pack on Wall StreetNine people in the US and Ukraine were charged on Tuesday with making $30m by hacking into business newswire services, reading corporate press releases before they came out, and then trading on that information ahead of the pack on Wall Street.Federal authorities said it was the largest scheme of its kind ever prosecuted. In a measure of the scope of the alleged conspiracy, the US Securities and Exchange Commission brought related civil charges against the nine plus 23 other people. Continue reading...

Tolerance of corporate secrecy and business-friendly tax laws in state where Google lists its official address have seen it labelled one of world’s top tax havensGoogle’s Street View cameras have photographed locations across the world, allowing armchair tourists a view of anything from the Tower of London to Tiananmen Square. But one address is notable by its absence. The office building at 2711 Centerville Road in Wilmington, Delaware, a small town just south of Philadelphia, has not been captured by the Street View cameras. And yet this is the official address of Google Inc, the holding company of one of the world’s most successful software groups.Related: Why Google is restructuring, why the name Alphabet and how it affects you Continue reading...

A bit like the phenomenon of stealth Starbucks branches, Google has become so ubiquitous it is choosing to fade into the background“Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things,” writes Google co-founder Larry Page, in his blogpost launching the company’s latest venture to the world: the birth of a Google mother-brand, henceforth to be known as Alphabet. It is something of an understatement for an organisation set on conquering every aspect of our known existence, having grown from the small ambition of indexing all the world’s information, into a web of endless autonomous divisions that now tackle everything from self-driving cars to roaming internet balloons to slowing down the process of ageing.So what brand could represent this new catch-all umbrella, an overarching vehicle for the company’s voracious new forays into further-flung fields? The evolution of the Google brand over the years has always reflected the company’s changing aspirations, from the homespun novelty WordArt of a pair of Stanford maths geeks, to the slick logo we see today. Continue reading...

Technology companies file brief with New York court urging judges to strike down film studios’ injunction in MovieTube piracy caseGoogle, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have accused US film studios of attempting to resurrect the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), which was defeated in Congress in 2012.